Extraplanar Advice
September 27th, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another exciting Grave Plots, where we bring you new plot hooks and adventure ideas each and every week. This week is Extraplanar Week here at Necromancers of the Northwest, and today’s article will focus on the worlds beyond the mortal realm.
Some of my all-time favorite campaigns focused very heavily on extraplanar themes, so you could say I was a fan of extraplanar adventures. Perhaps my favorite thing about extraplanar adventures is that if you jump from plane to plane on any kind of regular basis, then the setting remains fluid enough to support adventures of various different styles with wildly differing tones, allowing you as a DM a convenient excuse to run the best adventure you can each week without having to be tied down by keeping things too consistent each week. Of course, this doesn't mean there’s no room for consistency in planar games, in fact building a consistent cosmology (a topic I'll be discussing in greater detail at a later time) or even just keeping a pleasantly coherent feel to your “random junk” planar adventures will likely go a long way towards keeping your players invested and allowing them to relate to the situation in a meaningful way. In short, when setting off on a planar campaign you need something to tie all those random crazy adventures together.
For my part, I prefer a strong overarching story which somehow unites all the adventure the PCs undertake in a neat little package. Whether this means creating a grand plot which is advanced a little bit each adventure (much in the way most of the shows on USA Network tend to advance their general plot a little each episode), or creating a plot which evolves as PCs move from place to place, for my money, you can't beat a good narrative. Planar campaigns throw out all the regular limits on plausibility, similarly eliminating the restrictions on your storytelling; if ever you were looking for a time to have the PCs work directly for a divine entity or cross swords with the interplanar xorn mafia, this is your chance. Similarly, planar adventures where your PCs get to venture to places like Hades, Pandemonium, Elysium, or Valhalla, not to mention whatever fantastic places you can drag out of your own imagination, really gives you a great opportunity to create a story with which to showcase the struggles of good and evil, order and chaos, and reconcile that with a human perspective. Stories which cover things on such a grand scale are excellent for evoking both the most majestic of images in all their glory and showcasing a wide variety of conflicting philosophies, allowing the players to define for themselves the nature of your pretend universe and, just maybe, contemplate their own reality in new ways.
However, as loath as I might be to admit it, you don't really need a well-defined story to accomplish those goals. In point of fact, many players prefer to deal with something which doesn't require so much investment. If you're a group looking for something with a little less commitment attached to it all, you really need for a strong, cohesive planar campaign is a solid premise. For instance, the PCs might run an interplanar delivery service that takes on all jobs, no matter how dangerous – which would give you a fine excuse to send them into new danger each and every week. Or maybe the PCs are just a group of lost souls stranded impossibly far away from home, desperate to find a way back.
With a looser premise you have to work a little harder on the ambience of your extraplanar setting to get across all the little things you might otherwise have just written in, but you pick up a great deal more flexibility with what your adventures are doing. You don't have to spend as much advance planning time as you do with a big story, and perhaps most importantly, you can be happy when your PCs throw you a game-altering curve ball. If the PCs turn your loose premise upside-down, it’s easy to adjust and generally just makes for everyone having a better time than they would if things always stayed the same; but when the PCs mess up your story, well, that’s a horse of another color. For example, let’s say the PCs decide to stop being a delivery service and become enforcers for a group of devils who run a bank out of Hell. Things have changed, but it’s not like they can’t still be sent out on special assignments; you can still play all the adventures you want and go to all the exotic locations you would otherwise have sent them to. Now by contrast, if the PCs were on a holy quest to create an interplanar coalition in the face of a multiverse-ending threat and they all decide to go be evil banking enforcers… well, your whole campaign got turned on its head. My point is that with a loose premise, you pick up a lot of ability to roll with the punches and let the game take a more organic course than with a grand narrative.
However you create your extraplanar game, you should look to make the most memorable experience you possibly can. To that end, I have a few simple tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your extraplanar adventures. Firstly, be especially descriptive: you’re showing your players a vast and wondrous multiverse; don't skimp on the details or all that magnificence will just end up feeling like England in 1300. At the same time, it is important not to overload your players with descriptive details, or the game will get too bogged down in your ode to whatever otherworldly realm you’re currently on. A good balance would be to describe all the general scenery of a new area with a few carefully thought-out sentences, and then describe the important details, such as the lake of swirling steam that dominates the plateau, with only slightly more attention than you would were it, say, a crystal clear lake of wholly mundane water.
Create memorable characters; in the worlds beyond the normally fantastic realms in which fantasy games take place, eccentricity dominates: balor innkeepers, alcoholic angels, and centaur street gangs are to be expected. As a result, the NPCs the PCs actually deal with have to be of exceptional caliber; Joe the tavern proprietor just doesn't cut it in world where all-genie circuses are believable. Pay attention to the attention-grabbing details: “balor innkeeper” says a lot and instantly puts players on the edge of their seat with amused excitement. On the other hand, “balor innkeeper” doesn't mean anything if the supporting details aren’t there. Consider what kind of innkeeper he is, how he came to his profession, what’s on his menu: the sorts of thing that really bring the exciting NPCs to life.
Well that’s all for this week’s Grave Plots. I hope you'll all join me next week when I will be putting up the first of the animal contest articles; thanks to those of you who did write me, and I hope to hear from more of you in the future. Until then, allow me to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.